A founder who sold her first company for $25 million and landed Mark Cuban as an investor (twice) shares exactly what to say to pass a job interview at any startup

Courtesy of Kim Taylor

Kim Taylor, pictured, wants to know job candidates are comfortable with change.

• Kim Taylor is building Cluster, her second startup backed by Mark Cuban.
• When she hires, she screens for people who think startup life is glamorous but aren't necessarily suited to the environment.
• Instead, Taylor wants people who are excited about working on a breadth of problems and having their role change constantly.

There's one sentence that scares Kim Taylor more than any other when it comes out of an employee's mouth: "I don't know what I should be doing."

At that point, she knows that person won't be sticking around long at her company.

Taylor is a two-time startup founder. Her first company, online education startup Ranku, was sold to John Wiley & Sons in 2016 for a reported $25 million. Now she's building up Cluster, which recruits for advanced roles in manufacturing and just closed a $1.9 million seed round of funding. Mark Cuban, owner of the Dallas Mavericks and an investor on "Shark Tank," backed both companies.

Taylor said that her experiences at Ranku taught her to be more cautious about hiring at Cluster. Some people, she said, think startups are "sexy," but aren't necessarily suited to startup life, which is characterized by a lot of ambiguity and not a lot of structure.

Read more: 'Entrepreneurship porn' lures young people with a pretty picture of startup life, but it glosses over the most dangerous parts

At Cluster, she wants people who are excited to work on "a breadth of problems," as opposed to zeroing on a narrow specialty, like you might at a larger, more established organization. What's more, she looks for people who will be "comfortable with the fact that their role will be changing; they're going to be doing different things every day."

Taylor doesn't hire people who just want to make a lot of money

During the interview process, Taylor tries to screen for candidates who are taken in by the seeming glamour of entrepreneurship. To start, she isn't hiring anyone fresh out of college to fill the first few spots at Cluster, unless they have relevant work experience.

She also gives candidates "really unstructured problems" to solve, similar to the problems they'd solve at Cluster. "It actually becomes very clear, really quickly" who needs hand-holding and who doesn't.

Taylor also weeds out candidates who ask about matching salaries at Google or any other tech giants. That's an "automatic no," she said. "If you're trying to maximize salary by working at a seed-stage company, you don't understand startups, so you probably shouldn't work at one."

Taylor's insights echo those of other entrepreneurs, who have published lists of reasons not to work at a startup.

Dana Severson, director of growth at RightMessage, wrote on Inc., "You may apply to a startup for a specific job, and that job may have specific requirements. However, once you start, that all goes out the window." And entrepreneur and investor John Rampton wrote on Entrepreneur, "On top of the stress, long hours and low pay, you will have a lot of duties. ... Some people enjoy wearing multiple hats. Others like to know exactly what they have to do during the workweek."

Taylor emphasized that not everyone is suited to startup life - and that's just fine. But many candidates she interviews appear not to know whether they like corporate life either, suggesting that they're "uninformed."

It comes down to pinpointing the work environment where you'll thrive. For some people, Taylor said, wearing many hats is thrilling. For others? "It's terrible."